Saturday, July 29, 2000

7/29/2000 9:13:07 PM

A new patent threatens Web syndication.
Information Architects has
one
issued patent, no. 5,983,267 that it claims covers much of the
technology and business model of dynamic aggregation -- syndicating
Web content -- from both ends. Now iA
has issued a press
release announcing a new patent pending on the same topic. The
company says the new patent is complimentary to the '267; the press
release implies that iA believes the pending patent, once issued, will
sew up the company's right to charge a licence fee to anybody who uses
RSS, RDF, XML, or any similar technology to provide or consume summaries
of Web content. Such as for example TBTF,
roving_reporter, and (from
the other end of the pipe) SiteScooper
and UserLand.

It goes without saying that iA did not invent dynamic aggregation.

Thanks to TBTF Irregular Justin Mason (proprietor of the above-mentioned
SiteScooper) for the nod.

Friday, July 28, 2000

7/28/2000 1:05:13 PM

Coiner of the term "software" dies.John W. Tukey was a Princeton University statistician credited
with coining the word "software." He died yesterday of heart failure in New
Jersey. He was 85.
[NY Times obit]
Tukey first used "software" in a 1958 article in the American
Mathematical Monthly.

Tukey is also credited with coining the term "bit." Here's a
piece of computer history I've not seen documented anywhere -- the
fight to establish the terminology for what we now call a "bit." In
the early 1970s I heard Edward Teller speak at Livermore Labs. In
that temple to the supercomputer, Teller took as his theme the sheer
unnecessisariness, for any computation whatsoever, of any computer
larger than 4K of 8-bit memory. But Teller did not say "bit" -- he
contrarily said "bigit" (pronounced "bijit") every time. My
guess is that Teller, a man for whose eyebrows alone the word
"irascible" might have been invented, some time in the 1950s had
championed "bigit" as the proper term for "binary digit," but lost
out to Tukey's more elegant coinage.

7/28/2000 8:28:53 AM

"Safe Harbor" is OK with the EU after all.
Early this month the European Parliament
rejected
a proposed "safe harbor" data-protection agreement, two years in the
making, between the US Commerce Department and the EU. Now the
European Commission has
reversed
that ruling. This means the EU officially recognises the
adequacy of a privacy-protection regime in the US whereby companies
voluntarily adhere to a set of data-protection principles
promulgated by the Commission. The "safe harbor" arrangement will be
fully up and running by November

At the same time, the EC sanctioned similar regimes in Switzerland
and Hungary.

Thursday, July 27, 2000

7/27/2000 11:38:31 AM

ICANNthrope.
Ted Byfield, TBTF's roving_reporter,, has lately
been burning up the airwaves with his coverage of ICANN and
domain-naming developments. Yesterday he
boldly predicted
which three new top-level domain names are shoo-ins for
approval. Today he adds a
long and compelling look
at ICANN's increasingly broken Membership At Large program.

It appears that ManicMail has tightened up its access since the
above article appeared yesterday. To use the service now you need to
submit your name, email address, and reason for wanting access, and
ManicMail promises to get back to you. (They haven't gotten back to me yet.)

At ManicMail.net we have not tightened up any security measures and
still allow the sending of emails from the site for free and without
registration.

ManicMail forces the sender to acknowledge that bad things may befall if the
message is harassing or otherwise illegal. A savvy recipient can easily determine,
by examining the headers, that the message is not what it seems; but nothing in
the message body tips off the unwary.

Zoubidoo takes no such precautions against casual mischief. The
service does seem to have added a footer to outgoing mail containing
its URL -- this should significantly reduce the liklihood that you'll
be fooled when a cow-orker impersonates your boss to tell you that
you've been fired.

Thanks to Irregular Monty Solomon for the forward.

Wednesday, July 26, 2000

7/26/2000 8:14:31 AM

Privacy hunter Richard Smith gets backing.
Smith will be working with a new organization based at the
University of Denver. The
Privacy Center
will be funded by a nonprofit agency underwritten by Denver
entrepreneur Peter Barton. Smith will work with University
of Denver researcher David Martin and three associates.

Tuesday, July 25, 2000

7/25/2000 12:41:40 PM

Is Microsoft's .NET 100% vapor?
Joel Spolsky read Microsoft's .NET announcements and had a
reaction almost identical to mine. He wrote this insightful piece,
Microsoft
goes bonkers, detailing the utter lack of any content in
the program as announced. Someone inside Microsoft apparently agrees that,
if the emperor has any clothes, they have not yet been made manifest.
S/he sent Spolsky this revealing
letter.

Management spent nearly a year explaining how everyone needed to
focus on NGWS and how we could all fit into the vision - without
ever describing the goal. It was the proverbial answer in search
of a question. All of a sudden it has a new name, seemingly an
attempt to hide the fact that it still has no body.

Thanks to TBTF Irregular Justin Mason for the pointer.

Monday, July 24, 2000

7/24/2000 8:40:42 PM

The roving_reporter returns.
After a months-long hiatus, Ted Byfield has revived his
roving_reporter column on the
TBTF site. At present r_r is looking rather like a Web log.
Check in from time to time to see
what's new. Ted and I are working on ways to make r_r content
more visible from TBTF's top page.

7/24/2000 8:30:54 PM

ICANN: a failed experiment?
Lauren Weinstein and Peter Neumann have come out of the blue with a
manifesto
arguing strongly that ICANN, in its current incarnation, needs to
be scrapped as a noble experiment gone bad. The two authors,
moderators of the respected forums
Privacy
and Risks,
suggest establishing a new international organization that truly
balances the interests of the commercial Internet, private users,
not-for-profits, governments, and the disenfranchised on the wrong
side of the digital divide. It wouldn't surprise me if this manifesto
had real impact on the debate over ICANN.

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